Always Growing and Always Learning

My latest endeavor in the world of the digital humanities was confusing but also really fun after I got started. This is an original work of electronic literature, and more specifically,it is a hypertext narrative. I hope you are able to follow the narrative and can get something from my sort of story/sort of insight on growing.

-Alex 

Original E-Lit

Hey guys,

Feel free to take a look at my original work of E-lit, "The Job You Hate to Love." It's about some significant moments during the journey of my career in the fire service to date. It starts at my first day and highlights some events chronologically, with the last event being less than a week old.

View it here.

Dreams of Death: King Heroin

Hey, Guys! Please check out my original Google Maps Essay called "Dreams of Death: King Heroin". It is about a dream I once had based off of a Heroin Epidemic back home in Harrisburg, PA.
Thank You!

Click here for Dreams of Death: King Heroin

Archiving Drugs

    For centuries, people all over the world have chased an alternate dimension, or a different state of mental capabilities through the access of drugs.  They seek another state of mind and personality to explore, no matter how detrimental to their health or well-being.  Not to mention, illegal possessions which have greater repercussions.  Essentially, only one thing has changed over all of these years, and that is the method of how drugs are prepared and used.

    Something that would be eye-opening and most likely beneficial to society is to have an archive of some of the different paraphernalia used with the drugs. It would be a great way to see not only all of the differences but also some of the similarities from the early days of drug usage to today. Some of the archaic instruments that they may have used in the early 18^th century may not even be around nowadays for people to view.

Think of it as almost the same deal as a car: in the beginning, everything was very primitive-- there was nothing fancy about anything, it was made to simply do one job and one job only. The

same can be said about drug paraphernalia. It was most likely made to be used with drugs, and throughout the years, it has been modified to look like an everyday object because of the degree of police coverage and experience with drugs. Especially with the epidemic that our country is facing these days, it would be able to help people identify possible dangerous situations and maybe even help them save someone’s life.

    The way to go about creating a drug archive would be to first obtain a domain name on the internet.  From there, find some of the older paraphernalia dating back to the 18^th century and photograph it, making the pictures appear chronologically. It could start with the original devices and show the modifications made throughout the centuries and decades leading up to present day items used in drug abuse. Not only would it open up knowledge to the types of use, but it could also serve as a reminder that it is a very real situation that occurs more than most people think.  This archive would be beneficial to everyone, but most importantly to the future of our children and the safety of our country.

December Weekend in NYC

December Weekend in NYC

Please check out my original work of electronic literature.  This is a detailed description of a weekend I spent in NYC in December of 2014.

Data Mining Our Blogs

As we make our way through digital humanities, we are learning many different tools that allow us to view our work of electronic literature in many abstract ways.  This week, we are learning about data mining.  Data mining allows us to read behind the lines of our electronic words, which reveals the frequency of our text, redundancy, etc.  The two main tools that we used were Voyant and Google Ngram Viewer, which were offered to us from Dr. Justus.  Voyant allows users to enter text into the program, where it then pulls the most frequently used words and creates a collage of words.  There are many different tools built into this program, one of which allows the viewer to watch the program draw a map of the words.  Google Ngram Viewer is a tool that shows the timeline of words within any given time frame.  This program is unique in the way that it shows how words such as 'virtual' and 'identity' have a direct correlation as well as their frequency of usage. While researching, using our first blog posts, "What is Digital Humanities?" we found some surprising information.

Based off of what we found from the results on Voyant, the Ngram tool has provided us with some insight on how some of the most popular terms have been used and have correlated historically. According to Ngram, the terms humanities and DH have peaked very little, if not at all. With DH being very situation dependent, there is no surprise there. there is only some activity on it around 1980. Human and culture, on the other hand, have shared a bit of popularity over the years. They both experienced a spike in use around the 1960's, which is around the hippy movement, when everyone really started to focus on the human movement. As humanity started to progress into the 2000's, both of the words have risen simultaneously, sharing almost the same slope for both of them.

My Relevance in Social Media

Life is tough as a young adult placed in a social setting; further worsening the situation, digitize said social setting and you have a world made up of multiple social media platforms where people from all over the world can interact. As a young adult and a user of five different social media platforms, I can say with full confidence that the "self" I portray on each website is different but also similar in some ways. 

In the article "The Self in Selfie: Identity in the Age of Social Media," the author explains how social media users portray themselves differently than they do in real life. Take a celebrity, Kim Kardashian, as an example and look at how she portrays her life on Instagram-- in every photo, everyone is always posed perfectly, their skin is always smooth with no stretch or wrinkle, and even when she is "bare-faced," she still looks perfect. 

A contrasting example of this idea is my personal Twitter account. Although two completely different platforms of social media, my Twitter account contrasts with Kim Kardashian's Instagram. My tweets are more honest and tend to be stream of consciousness that fit within a certain sarcastic narrative. In person I am quiet and I don't share my opinions unless I feel comfortable to do so. On Twitter, I share my opinions freely with my followers as well as anything that is relevant to social media culture. This starkly contrasts with Kim K's use of her social media because she filters what her followers take in while I tweet statements that directly reflect my thoughts. 

Tim Virtual Identity

I feel as though my virtual reality mirrors my actual self fairly well. I like to think that I'm a fairly straight forward person, and content enough with who I am to share with others. Some people, I have noticed, try to bolster their appearance on social media to maybe make themselves seem more impressive. The question I always ask is who are you trying to impress? My pages are me. The sarcasm that I share on my pages and the sick and sometimes sadistic humor that make an appearance on my page are the same things that I enjoy in real life. Of course, I use the term "enjoy" very loosely. Personally, I use social media for a form of entertainment. When I log into Facebook or Instagram, I like to look a posts and pages that make me feel happy, or leave me laughing. With that, I like to try and instill the same feeling amongst those that may be viewing my page or seeing what I post. I don’t want to be characterized as one of those people that are always complaining about every minute detail about their life to their Facebook friends instead of hitting the problem head-on to mitigate it. In the same token, with today’s electronic society, the last thing that I want is for a future employer to look at my page(s) and see nothing but vulgarity and negativity. If I were an employer and see nothing but complaining and whining on someone’s page, that screams to me that the person is not proactive. They would rather sit back and ride the wave, rather than swim through it and fight the resistance. With that being said, if my personal page is nothing but unprofessional, what will that look like to someone that is looking in to hiring me as a part of their company? They say that first impressions can mean the world. What more is social media than one giant first impression? Wouldn’t you want it to be the best that it possibly can?

Bailyn's Virtual Identity

What is a Virtual Identity?

A virtual identity is a profile that an individual makes on social medias such as Facebook, Instagram, or even videogames.  Those who create the accounts are completely free to manage the account however they please, selectively choosing what information other viewers get to see.  According to CNN.com, “In a virtual world, online identity is potentially much more flexible than real identity, allowing easily changes in race, class, gender, age, socio-economic background, and even species.”  Virtual identities are sometimes an escape for people, where there are able to perceive their lives differently than the real world.  Actually- as I am writing this blog I keep singing Brad Paisley’s song, Online…it is directly related to this topic!  Not all online profiles fake information to make an individual look more impressive, they can also show more personal information to the public that isn’t necessarily known.  Take LinkedIn for instance, it allows professionals to talk about their business success, certificates received, and to connect with potential employers near and far.  For this type of account, it is crucial for the account information to be correct and up to date.  In all aspects, virtual identity offers more for others to see than a driver’s license, or personal image in the real world.

My Virtual Identity

With the internet becoming more modern, it is common for everyone to have online accounts.  I have accounts on Ingram, Facebook, Pinterest, etc.  I feel like my virtual identity is very true to who I am in real life as well.  I don’t have any fake accounts, I don’t post stuff that I don’t believe in, and I am constantly updating information as it becomes known.  We talked as a class about whether or not we actually exist in a virtual reality, or if it is just our conscious.  I believe that a little bit of everyone’s conscious resides in every online account they create.  When we are making those profiles as a snapshot into our lives, we are very tedious, accurate, and judgmental of ourselves.  We want to look perfect in the eyes of others, therefore we are always worried about what they are seeing, thinking, and reading.  The days of technology advancing, our conscious is only going to become more submerged in online identities as the years go on.

Is Human Intelligence Natural?

I believe that Human Intelligence is natural, and that we were placed on this earth in order to learn and develop our brains and knowledge over time.  It all starts in pre-school where we learn the basics and it gets harder over time as we seek higher education and challenging degrees.  We all have different abilities which shape the way in which we learn, but in one way or another, every person on this earth is learning something or demonstrating something they have learned, every single day.  There are some instances where natural human intelligence needs to be controlled, just to maintain appropriateness for example.  There is a quote I read online that is perfect for this paragraph, because it explains how human intelligence is natural, endless, and enhancing our future.  “Human Intelligence and ingenuity have consistently and repeatedly unlocked technological and scientific advances that have raised the standard of living each generation compared to its predecessor, while increasing the ability of human society to support larger numbers of people and increasing the carrying capacity of the planet.”  This quote ties us into the next section, about natural intelligence in terms of technology, where it is argued that intelligence in terms of technology is not natural, but instead programmed.

Is Technology Intelligence Natural?

I do not believe that computer intelligence is natural.  Just because technology is able to respond to us when we ask certain questions or select certain buttons, it was not able to do that without prior help.  I argue this opinion because somewhere, behind the scenes, there is someone who had to program the technology to be capable for responding intelligently.  A computer by itself is not smart, and has no prior knowledge of its own.  Take Siri for instance, if you do not ask her questions in a specific sequence, she is not helpful at all.  Siri would probably be able to pass the Turing test, but it is not something thought of to have natural intelligence.  Think about it, Siri is programmed in English, so what happens if you want to use a different language…will it work??  On the supporting side, some argue that because our suggestions on Facebook for ‘people you may know’ are 90% correct that we know that person, it does classify as natural intelligence.  Wrong.  Facebook is able to recommend stuff to us, based on a program that gives feedback based on the links you click on.  We, the users, and giving the programmers information that they are relaying back to us through the computer software.